Nebulous Mooch

I was always a scared child.

• Crowds scared me.
• The Ragged Ann and Andy movie scared me.
• ET scared me.
• The Electric Company television show scared me.
• Motorcycles scared me.
• Santa Claus
• Loud noises scared me.
• Balloons scared me.
• Hats were so so scary.

Children have a few techniques they use to deal with fear. Most cry and cling to their parents for safety. I did that, but I had another coping mechanism that worked really well for me. I’d bite. I was especially fond of biting my father when I was scared. This somehow brought me comfort and security. There’s nothing like sinking your teeth into warm living flesh to make you feel better. My behavior probably made my father afraid of these things too because he knew what was coming.

I’ve probably gotten this story wrong in some way. My mother will call me on Sunday, because she always calls on Sundays, to inform me that I bit her too. I’m sure I did, but she never really talks about it so I have no story. You see, and this is a lesson to all of you who have children, the loudest story accompanied by the most laughter is the one that gets remembered.

Note: I don’t bite when I’m scared anymore. You could watch a the Ragged Ann and Andy movie with me without any worries of me taking a hunk of flesh out of your arm. I promise.

For all of you who don’t think that Ragged Ann and Andy could possibly be frightening, I dare you to watch this clip. If it doesn’t give you nightmares it will at least make you bite someone. On You Tube the first comment under this video is “Ragged Ann scares me.” I rest my case.

When I was in elementary school my two most hated subjects were spelling and phonics. I was always a good student. I got A’s most of the time, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to get F’s on spelling tests.

In third grade one of the boys in class cheated on his spelling test by copying mine. He was stunned when he failed. “I thought you were smart,” he said to me when he got his test paper back. I think the highest score I ever got on a spelling test in third grade was a C and that was amazing.

My problem is with short vowel sounds. Many of them sound the same to me. Apparently there are differences in the pronunciation of certain words that I just don’t hear. Words like pen and pin, him and hem, and then and than all sound the same to me. I never realized there was any difference in the pronunciation of these words at all before my husband pointed them out to me.

I like blame my pronunciation problems on my regional accent, but I don’t think I’m fooling anyone.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like the idea of getting an award. Yeah, it’s nice to be appreciated for something you’ve done well, but I could do without the whole awards ceremony thing. I think it’s because of the traumatic experience I had in third grade.

When I was eight I entered a fire prevention contest. I had to draw a poster to help educate children about fire safety, and my poster was one of the winners. A fire truck came to the school to pick me up. The firemen came to my classroom and announced that I’d won and they were there take me to the award ceremony. My whole class went outside to see me off. It should’ve been very exciting, but it wasn’t. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten a very unfortunate haircut.

On the way to the fire house one of the firemen referred to me as “he” and I didn’t correct him. At the ceremony when my name was called to get my award, some boys in the front row loudly exclaimed, “It’s a girl,” and all I wanted to do was run out of the room, but I couldn’t. I spent the whole rest of the day holding back tears. Since that day I never wanted anything to do with award ceremonies ever again. Well, until the other day that is.

My husband was nominated for some jazz award. I’m so terrible because I don’t even know what the award was.

Anyway even though we usually behave like hermits, we decided to go to the ceremony/jam session. Though my husband was nominated he never got any kind of notice or invitation to the ceremony. He only found out about the ceremony because he did a gig with the person who nominated him the day before.

The awards looked like someone had sawed off a couple of table legs and painted them gold.

When they read the list of nominees not everyone’s names were on the list. People were yelling out from the audience, “What about me. I was nominated too.”

The person who announced the award left a list of the nominees and who voted for whom on the stage. Of course, everyone who was nominated got a good look at it during the jam session. It turns out that the nominees who didn’t get their names read out weren’t on the list because no one had voted for them. That’s a drag.

And, the best part of the whole evening was watching a twenty minute tap dance routine done on a carpeted floor by a guy who only knew three moves. Classic, as my husband would say, just classic.

I’ll post pictures from the evening tomorrow.

In high school, our foreign language choices were French or Spanish. That’s it. At the time I thought French was the language of snobs so I chose to take Spanish–a down to earth language of the people. That’s what I told my friends when they asked me why I wanted to learn Spanish.

The language I wanted to study in high school didn’t matter much. When I got my schedule at the beginning of the year in the slot where a language should’ve been my schedule contained the word typing. Typing? How was that going to help me get into college?

The typing teacher scared me, but I was overly timid. She was old and stern and didn’t take any funny business. If you were caught chewing gum in her class, she’d make you ball it up and stick it to your nose. We all sat at huge electric typewriters and did typing exercises. The room was filled with the racket of banging typewriters. Those things are really loud.

Maybe some of you aren’t familiar with electric typewriters. So here’s a demonstration.

What you type goes directly on the the paper. Crazy, huh? I don’t know how people ever lived like that! Now imagine thirty of those going all at once in a smallish classroom. That was typing class.

I  wander if that was the only class my typing teacher taught. If so, I don’t know how she managed to hold on to her sanity. I’d have gone crazy if I had to listen to that noise all day. That’s probably why she occasionally made us watch films on hygiene. I guess she thought we needed some tips on how to bathe or maybe she’d just do anything to get a break from all that noisy typing.

I never had the opportunity to take Spanish in high school. Foreign languages just weren’t in the cards for me. My adviser must’ve thought I was destined to be a secretary or something, because the following year I ended up in information processing class. Information processing just meant typing on a computer and learning shorthand. Since I do a lot of typing on a computer now, I guess those classes better prepared me for my future career than Spanish ever would’ve. Now all I have to do is find an opportunity to use shorthand.

When I was little all I wanted to do was be on Star Search. I thought I was best suited for the female vocalist or the TV spokes model category. No matter what category, I competed in I knew I’d mop the floor with the competition. Yeah we have the Idol competitions and X Factor and this or that country’s Got Talent now, but nothing beats Star Search. What’s a talent competition without Ed McMahon?

Have you ever wanted something really badly, but been unable to have it? When I was a kid I really wanted a monkey. I’d even heard that you could train your pet monkey to change its own diapers and I thought that was pretty cool. I don’t know why you couldn’t just train it to use the toilet. Anyway, I wanted a monkey so badly and my parents just weren’t having it.

“Those are evil animals,” my father told me like he’d had personally experience with monkeys. He seemed so sure about it  that I wondered if a monkey had killed his best friend and stolen his girl when he was in high school. “We’re not having one of those things in this house. They stink.”

That meant no monkey for me. When that was finally made clear my desire turned to disdain. I decided to hate monkeys which is funny really. How can you possibly hate a monkey? They have such cute little faces. They do such entertaining things like dance and juggle. You can dress them up in outfits. They can even wear hats and sunglasses.

If there was ever a monkey on TV I’d change the channel. I would never watch a movie that featured a monkey, chimp or orangutan. Looking back this was a wise decision. I think that a monkey in a movie is just a desperate attempt by film makers to keep viewers from noticing how bad the script and actors are.

Producer: Do you think the audience will be annoyed when they realize they sat through two hours of story just to find out it’s all a dream?

Director: Not at all. I mean Hulk Hogan has the dynamic range and acting chops to really make the main character come alive.

Producer: Maybe we should put a monkey in it just to be sure.

Director: Great idea. Everyone loves monkeys!

Now that I’m an adult I could have a pet monkey if I really wanted one, but somehow the whole idea has lost its appeal. I no longer hate monkeys. I believe that monkeys are just as good as cats or dogs. Maybe they’re even better because they have cute little hands and opposable thumbs. The two men I live with already make it hard enough to keep the bathroom clean. Imagine how bad the toilet would look if a monkey were using it too.

First photo:  mape_s’

Second photo: Public domain

My husband: When I was a kid we used to have ice cream cake every Saturday.

I haven’t eaten cake for a very long time, but my husband is well aware of my previous love for cake, especially ice cream cake.

Me: What kind of fantasy world did you grow up in? We only had ice cream cake on someone’s birthday and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. When we did have it one of my parents would always mention how expensive it was while we were eating it.

My husband: We had ice cream every night after dinner too.

Me: Every night, weren’t you living the good life? Don’t ever tell me your family didn’t have much money when you grew up again.

My husband: I owned the same two shirts for three year running. Those were the only shirts I had. They had buttons missing.

Me: Who cares? What kid cares about new shirts. Kids want ice cream.

When I was a kid if someone gave me the choice between a new shirt and ice cream, I’d have wanted the ice especially if it were vanilla, unless it was in cake form, then it didn’t matter what flavor it was. (I think that was a run-on sentence, but I don’t want to correct it.)

The other night I said something to my husband about a crazy lunatic and as soon as I said it I regretted it. I hear people say that all the time and it drives me crazy. What other kind of lunatic is there–a sane lunatic?

When I was little I remember my mother telling me about where babies come from. When she explained to me that the baby actually comes out of a woman’s vagina, I was shocked. I thought that she had taught me that men didn’t have vaginas. Her statement “a woman’s vagina” left me baffled. Maybe I’d been mistaken. Maybe men did have vaginas.

After doing some asking around, I found out that I was right about men not having vaginas. So what did she mean when she said that the baby comes out of a woman’s vagina? After a lot of careful thought and consideration, I decided she was talking about one specific woman.

I pictured a large woman reclined on a bed popping baby after baby out of her vagina. Expectant couples would stand in line waiting their turn to catch a squirming baby as it popped out of her vagina into their open arms.

When my sister was born I discovered this wasn’t true. The image of the woman faded from my memory. I thought I’d been a crazy lunatic to ever have believed something so silly.

Author’s Note: I just spell checked this and my spellchecker told me that the plural of vagina is vaginae. I’m not changing the spelling in this post because vaginae, come on, that just sounds ridiculous.

My cousins owned a bright blue parakeet named Lydia when I was growing up. They let Lydia fly around loose in the house. She liked to perch on the large mirror that hung on the wall in the living room. I remember seeing her white bird poop dripping down the front of the usually gleaming mirror and wanting to run from the house in horror.

My cousins liked to try to get Lydia to perch on their shoulders. Sometimes she’d perch on my oldest cousins head and peck at her hair. “Just hold your finger out and she’ll land on it,” they’d tell me as Lydia flew wildly around the living room.

I didn’t like Lydia. I tried to touch her head once and she bit me with her sharp curved beak. She was always flapping around over head, and that disturbed me.

Flapping and hopping are my two least favorite animal activities. Now that I think of it, I’m also not very fond of barking, biting, scratching or mauling someone to death either. Flapping is the thing that bothers me the most about birds. It’s good to watch them fly from a distance, but as soon as those flapping wings get too close to me I panic.

Lydia didn’t last very long. She got out one day. While I did feel sad when I heard, I was also a little relieved.

When I was young, I never really liked Halloween. My mother had a paper sari and usually wrapped me up in it, put a dot on my forehead and called me Indira Gandhi. When I told the other kids what my custume was, they’d look at me like I was speaking a foreign language. When I stood at their doors wrapped in my green paper sari with my crooked pigtails, adults always said, “Look, an Indian princess!”

I’d respond with indignation. “No. I’m Indira Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of India.”

“Very good,” they’d say, as they dropped handfuls of Tootsie Rolls and Dumdums into my pillowcase.

I always seemed to get more Tootsie Rolls than anything else. I didn’t even like Tootsie Rolls. My father made out best during Halloween. He loved Tootsie Rolls.

One Halloween, I saw a news report about bad guys putting razor blades in apples and sewing needles in candy bars. That year, I eyed the people dropping candy into my pillowcase suspiciously. I only ate the hard candy and lollipops, and let my sister and father eat the rest. I watched them eat chocolate bars and taffy and waited for them to gag and spit up blood. Luckily, that didn’t happen, and I was able to return to my normal candy consumption the following year.

Now I rarely dress up for Halloween. I’m one of those people who turns off all the lights and hides out from trick or treaters. I wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of putting a sewing needle in their Tootsie Roll.